Burt's Eye View: Liberalism is a Cult

10 Sep 2009

For the longest time, I’ve insisted that liberalism is the religion of choice for atheists, agnostics and run-of-the-mill secularists. After all, be they Christians, Jews, Moslems or Buddhists, the truly devout accept the tenets of their religion on faith. They can try to have logical debates with the likes of a Christopher Hitchens, but in the end it all comes down to a couple of people getting red in the face, hollering “Is so” and “Is not” at each other.

But, of late, I’ve decided that referring to liberalism as a religion for non-believers is showing it too much respect. It far more resembles a cult. Even the expression about leftists drinking the Kool-Aid refers to an actual cult, the one created by the certifiable loony, Jim Jones. Having led his flock of deranged sheep from San Francisco to Guyana, one day in 1978, he ordered more than 900 of his followers to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.

It would be easy enough to dismiss Jones as just another cuckoo, except that he was a man well-connected in left-wing circles. Mayor George Moscone had appointed him Chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority. He was on a first-name basis with Walter Mondale and Rosalynn Carter. Governor Jerry Brown, Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymally and Assemblyman Willie Brown, all attended a testimonial dinner honoring Jim Jones in 1976. What makes that date all the more remarkable isn’t just that it was a scant two years before Jones choreographed the mass suicide, but three years after a series of critical newspaper articles had appeared and after eight members of the cult had defected and warned the world that he was a deranged menace.

It was in 1973, after the articles began appearing, that Jones started looking for an escape route. The options he considered included Canada, Trinidad and the socialist nation of Guyana. He favored the last-named because he approved of its left-wing government, having preached that “those who remain drugged with the opiate of religion have to be brought to enlightenment — socialism.” But a contributing factor in making him settle on Guyana was that it lacked an extradition treaty with the United States.

He referred to his creed as apostolic socialism and called his settlement the People’s Temple Agricultural Project. It’s always a good idea to give anything that puts “People’s” in its title a wide berth, be it a cult in South America or a country, such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria or the People’s Republic of China.

Just like the disciples of Jim Jones, liberals, too, will swallow any swill. They will believe, for example, that Al Gore is a science maven. They will parrot his absurd prognostications even when he goes from yakking incessantly about “global warming” to “climate change” without missing a beat, even though changing from one to the other is tantamount to warning people of a locust invasion one second and sounding the alert about an incoming comet the next.

But no self-respecting liberal would ever think to ask the man if by climate change, he meant that we were now facing the danger of global-cooling, and that we had better watch out for expanding icebergs and those marauding gangs of polar bears. Liberals don’t think twice about comparing George W. Bush to Hitler and Sarah Palin to a cheap slut, but they would never think of embarrassing one of their own with an honest question. One can easily picture Al Gore, whose cash register hasn’t stopped ka-chinging for even five seconds since he lost the 2000 election, saying in that self-reverential tone of his: “Are you going to believe me or that icicle hanging from your nose?”

Another thing about which all liberals agree is that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. Recently, I even heard Bill O’Reilly insist that Obama’s birth certificate is a non-issue and that nobody really cares about it. By this time, I have come to regard the Number One Name in Cable News as a big blowhard, so his observation, needless to say, did nothing to change my opinion. But the truth is, a lot of people care about the birth certificate and Obama’s passport and what nationality he claimed to be on his college application. I know they do because they keep writing to me about these things. For my part, I hope Obama is an American citizen. I wouldn’t want to witness the inevitable riots in the streets of this nation if there were a move to depose him. I would much prefer to see Blue Dog Democrats join with Republicans to stop Cap & Trade and Obamacare in their tracks, and then have conservatives elected in record numbers in 2010. Nothing I’d enjoy more than seeing Obama turned into a lame duck for the last two years of his term, and see people like Harry Reid, Arlen Specter, Chris Dodd and Henry Waxman, turned into private citizens. And the more private, the better.

The hypocrisy of liberals is apparent in the fact that not a single one has expressed any concern over Obama’s refusal to offer up any of those documents or expressed the slightest alarm over the Constitution’s being treated like so much toilet paper. On the other hand, imagine how the NY Times and all its hand maidens in the MSM would be carrying on if, instead of being a left-wing ideologue, The Man Without a Country were a Republican!

When you get right down to it, the worst thing about cults is that, unlike the Jonestowners, they so rarely drink the right blend of Kool-Aid.